Speaker 1: You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mere acknowledges
Speaker 1: the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
Speaker 1: is recorded on. For me, the first sign is always reading,
Speaker 1: as in I can't, which is awkward because reading and
Speaker 1: writing and reading and thinking and reading and talking is
Speaker 1: what I do who I am, so when I can't
Speaker 1: do it, I'm cut off from myself. For me, the
Speaker 1: inability to focus on anything longer than a SoundBite is
Speaker 1: the first sign of the disease of our post everything
Speaker 1: world burnout. That might not be the canary in your
Speaker 1: coal mine yours. Might be sleep that you can't or
Speaker 1: you can't stop, or that, however much you do, you
Speaker 1: can't seem to recharge, or eating that you can't or
Speaker 1: you can't stop. It might be headaches, the eye twitch
Speaker 1: that keeps showing up, a rash, a dizziness that spins
Speaker 1: you suddenly off balance as you step off the bus.
Speaker 1: It might be your mood, a shortness, a low grind
Speaker 1: of frustration, irritation shifting into a fury about how everything
Speaker 1: just doesn't quite ever so slightly work. Is it Perry
Speaker 1: or the big m?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Probably? Is it something catastrophic come knocking to up end
Speaker 1: your life. Hopefully not hopefully, it's just burnout, just that
Speaker 1: crushing exhaustion and anxious flutter, just that inability to focus,
Speaker 1: to stop the endless fubbing and scrolling and incessant fritted multitasking,
Speaker 1: just the colds that keep showing up and never really leave,
Speaker 1: and just the gittering stress that keeps you in constant motion,
Speaker 1: all glued to your bed. They say burnout is the
Speaker 1: modern disease, and they know what the common cure is,
Speaker 1: slow down, dar But that's easier said, because rest isn't
Speaker 1: real when it's served with the relentless guilt of what
Speaker 1: you should be doing. At work, with the pinging and
Speaker 1: the dinging and the sorry to bother you. But at
Speaker 1: home with all the caring, the actual caring, the carrying
Speaker 1: and wiping and feeding and shopping and cooking, and the
Speaker 1: mental load of caring for anyone, a partner, a parent,
Speaker 1: a host of small people, sick, family, struggling friends, that
Speaker 1: scrolling mental list of what has to happen when, for who?
Speaker 1: How can all that just slow down? I'm asking, of course,
Speaker 1: for a friend. Hello, I'm Holly Wainwright and this is
Speaker 1: mid the show for Generation X Women who are anything
Speaker 1: but Today's mid guest is Catherine May. She's a writer.
Speaker 1: She wrote a book that so many people read during
Speaker 1: those smudgy days of lockdown that it became a massive
Speaker 1: global bestseller and stayed on. It's called Wintering, and she
Speaker 1: wrote it before the word COVID existed. It was all
Speaker 1: about her own experience of understanding a literal need to winter,
Speaker 1: to retreat, and that sometimes a winter can be forced
Speaker 1: on you by circumstance, like an illness or recovery, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it's a necessary period of time and rest and retreat,
Speaker 1: of pairing life back to the things that sustain us.
Speaker 1: And it's also about literal winter and embracing that special
Speaker 1: kind of shift it gives us, rather than only railing
Speaker 1: against it, waiting for summer to come back with a blast.
Speaker 1: Wintering is a beautiful book, and I'm one of many
Speaker 1: people who found it nourishing during a difficult moment. You'll
Speaker 1: hear my own professional gush about that at the beginning
Speaker 1: of our conversation, and please forgive me. But Catherine May
Speaker 1: is more than Wintering, of course. Her most recent book, Enchantment,
Speaker 1: is about finding beauty and awe in every day. She
Speaker 1: also has a podcast, A Substack is a parent and
Speaker 1: she lives in England by the Sea, which is where
Speaker 1: she was when I spoke to her about burnout. I
Speaker 1: listened to Wintering, actually, because one of my signs that
Speaker 1: things are going a bit lopsided for me is similar
Speaker 1: to one of yours. It's that I stopped being able
Speaker 1: to read.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I had just moved two hours out of
Speaker 1: Sydney to the countryside, started anew much longed for but
Speaker 1: still quite discombobulating change. We went into lockdown. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you hear this story all the time, and I would
Speaker 1: listen to Wintering as I was walking our dog around
Speaker 1: this strange new place we'd moved to, and it was
Speaker 1: literally winter here in New South Wales at that time,
Speaker 1: and it was just so profoundly helpful to me. Catherine.
Speaker 1: So I know you must get this a lot, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to thank you for helping me reframe that
Speaker 1: time instead of thinking I've moved away from my friends,
Speaker 1: I'm lonely, I'm in this strange place. How do I
Speaker 1: recombobulate I'm not able to go out and do all
Speaker 1: the things I'd normally do. Wintering really helped me see
Speaker 1: it as a period of transition and important restoration. So
Speaker 1: thank you for that.
Speaker 2: Well, that makes me really happy to hear. I mean,
Speaker 2: I wrote it because I wanted to give that to
Speaker 2: people who it's delightful, but it's kind of worked.
Speaker 1: It definitely has. I've listened to Enchantment too. I actually
Speaker 1: think your books are wonderful for audiobooks, so thank you
Speaker 1: for that. Anyway, I wanted to talk about burnout because
Speaker 1: I think there is something that a lot of women
Speaker 1: listening to this show will be experiencing or have experienced,
Speaker 1: and in Enchantment, you right, that burnout is what happens
Speaker 1: when you repeatedly ignore your own needs. I'd love you
Speaker 1: to talk to me a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't think it is necessarily a very
Speaker 2: modern phenomenon, but we are beginning to understand it as
Speaker 2: a pattern in the lives of people who are self
Speaker 2: identified as busy, let's say, which you know, is something
Speaker 2: that we have learned to put a lot of stock
Speaker 2: in this idea that we are so busy all the time,
Speaker 2: which means that we are in demand and needed, you know,
Speaker 2: which speaks to an anxiety of ours that we're not
Speaker 2: good enough. And what that busyness often does is it
Speaker 2: it urges us to not pay attention to really ordinary
Speaker 2: signs of tiredness and exhaustion and jadedness and unhappiness. You know,
Speaker 2: we squash those down because the busyness, on one hand
Speaker 2: tells us that they're not important, but it also stops
Speaker 2: us from feeling them. We're in such a rush that
Speaker 2: we kind of gloss over the top. And if you
Speaker 2: pair that with the messaging coming from the outside that
Speaker 2: that busyness is the right way to live what you've got,
Speaker 2: there is a kind of gaslighting of ourselves, which then
Speaker 2: means that the true exhaustion happens well after the time
Speaker 2: that we can really do anything about it. And I
Speaker 2: think that's what burnout is. It's this kind of combination
Speaker 2: of psychological and physical exhaustion that it's very hard to
Speaker 2: crawl back out of in a simple way.
Speaker 1: You've written about experiencing burnout several times in several different ways,
Speaker 1: and one of your symptoms I've read about is similar
Speaker 1: to mine, the fact that you're it's the inability to read,
Speaker 1: which is writers it's very awkward, deeply ashamed of that
Speaker 1: when it comes and you write about distraction too, about
Speaker 1: needing and wanting to go and sit down and work,
Speaker 1: but you write about how you sit at your desk
Speaker 1: and instead your frinner between Instagram and Twitter and the
Speaker 1: news and Twitter. And we've all been there as well.
Speaker 1: What have you learned about those sort of signs of
Speaker 1: that and what helps to bring you back in terms
Speaker 1: of your focus being so fractured.
Speaker 2: I think over the last few years, I've really learned
Speaker 2: to flip over what I think about those moments when
Speaker 2: my attention is really scattered and all over the place,
Speaker 2: because I used to see that as the cause of
Speaker 2: my suffering, and now I see it as a symptom.
Speaker 2: You know. I used to think that, oh, my attention
Speaker 2: isn't good enough, and therefore I'm unable to read, and
Speaker 2: therefore i'm you know, or I'm not getting enough out
Speaker 2: of life, or I'm not working hard enough. But actually
Speaker 2: what they are is often like an early signal that
Speaker 2: I'm very anxious or that I'm very overstretched. And when
Speaker 2: you start to read it like that, you know that
Speaker 2: flicking between Twitter and Instagram and the news and you know,
Speaker 2: all of these sources of information, you can begin to
Speaker 2: see them as reaching for safety, reaching for some kind
Speaker 2: of solid ground or something that tells you that everything's okay.
Speaker 2: And the problem with those media is that they're never
Speaker 2: going to tell you everything's okay because they're not set
Speaker 2: up to do that.
Speaker 1: Now, it's not good for their business model to tell
Speaker 1: you that everything's okay.
Speaker 2: It's very good for their business model to keep us
Speaker 2: in this constant state of checking, actually in wonder and
Speaker 2: feeling like there's no resolution to anything, and also feeling
Speaker 2: like our response isn't good enough, or getting into conflict
Speaker 2: over those things, and you know, getting into conflicts that
Speaker 2: are really none of our business because they're not about
Speaker 2: things we know anything about. But we're still absorbed in
Speaker 2: that act of conflict anyway. And so we're turning to
Speaker 2: anxiety machines in order to alleviate our anxiety. And it's
Speaker 2: no surprise that we're feeling correctly anxious under the circumstances.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and that that's not going to work. So, with
Speaker 1: all that busyness, all the balls in the air, and
Speaker 1: our plates over flowing, how do we find the little
Speaker 1: bits of awe and rest in fact in the day
Speaker 1: to day? That's next, I think to a point in
Speaker 1: the culture, we've sort of internalized that we do know
Speaker 1: what the cure for this is, which is it's meant
Speaker 1: to be mindfulness, meditation, exercise, diet boundaries. But some of
Speaker 1: those things are just exceptionally hard to implement. And there's
Speaker 1: a moment in Enchantment where you were talking about your
Speaker 1: meditation process and how you've at times drifted away from it,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly you were like, maybe a man designed
Speaker 1: this process of me needing to take these two like
Speaker 1: time periods of time for me out of the day.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I learned to meditate, Oh goodness
Speaker 2: me about twenty years ago now, And it came up
Speaker 2: even then. You know that this man who was teaching
Speaker 2: a group of mainly women to meditate, had these very
Speaker 2: very firm rules about how it is done. You know,
Speaker 2: it must be twenty minutes twice a day. It must
Speaker 2: be before you've eaten in the morning, it must be
Speaker 2: every single day, blah blah blah, on and on and
Speaker 2: on and on. And a woman sitting next to me at the
Speaker 2: time said, you know, what does your wife do when
Speaker 2: you're doing all of this? You know who's looking after
Speaker 2: your children? And his response I think told me everything
Speaker 2: really at the time, which was, oh, she's really behind
Speaker 2: me meditating.
Speaker 1: I bet she is.
Speaker 2: She is. But you know, I think we do need
Speaker 2: to start really thinking about the solutions we're being offered,
Speaker 2: particularly the ones that are telling us that we don't
Speaker 2: have enough discipline or that we're not making enough time,
Speaker 2: because actually our sense of being overstretched is genuine. It's
Speaker 2: not some kind of thing that we've confected. And if
Speaker 2: only we organized ourselves more, we'll do it better. And
Speaker 2: I don't think that's ever more clear than in the
Speaker 2: case of people who are caring for somebody else, which
Speaker 2: so many of us are. We don't get to map
Speaker 2: our days out like that because actually our lives are
Speaker 2: more about responding to the needs of somebody else, and
Speaker 2: that's a good thing, right. We need to be able
Speaker 2: to do that with an our society, But we also
Speaker 2: need to be able to have a different conversation about
Speaker 2: what a kind of a life of contemplation or a
Speaker 2: life with a spiritual dimension is, because we can't just
Speaker 2: step away from those roles in order to you know,
Speaker 2: take a two week you know, meditation. Really, it just
Speaker 2: isn't possible it's not a mindset issue, and therefore we
Speaker 2: need to start to acknowledge the spiritual life or the
Speaker 2: contemplative life, or the reflective life that's found in everyday life,
Speaker 2: because it is there. It's just not honored enough in
Speaker 2: our culture.
Speaker 1: And you right about finding a lot of that in
Speaker 1: nature as many as many of us do and walking,
Speaker 1: do you have to work to find the awe in
Speaker 1: every day that's going to reset you? Or is there
Speaker 1: like a listen to me, I sound like I'm asking
Speaker 1: you for hacks, like, but is there which is? Which
Speaker 1: is the antithesis of what we're talking about?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 1: But is it almost become a practice in itself to
Speaker 1: learn to find those moments throughout the day, in everyday
Speaker 1: life rather than this, Okay, I'm blocking out. You know,
Speaker 1: I've just done school drop off. Now I've got twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: You know, I love you? Yeah, why are you how
Speaker 1: I argue you feed it in?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I am resistant to hacks and that's really because
Speaker 2: I was always looking for hacks until quite recently in
Speaker 2: my life, you know, and they always left me feeling
Speaker 2: really beref because there is no shortcut to looking after
Speaker 2: your engagement over the long term. You know, there's no
Speaker 2: one simple trick that you can click through to on
Speaker 2: the internet that will solve this for you forever. In
Speaker 2: many cases, it's about lowering your expectation of what you're
Speaker 2: going to get from these moments and allowing yourself to
Speaker 2: have many small experiences rather than one big, expensive, costly
Speaker 2: chance for lifetime experience. And it's also about the very boring,
Speaker 2: which is repetition and iteration, right, and keeping returning, and
Speaker 2: as part of that like failing all the time too,
Speaker 2: you know, constantly dropping off that wagon because things get
Speaker 2: busy and you've got a sick child at home, or
Speaker 2: you've got you know, an elderly parent who's demanding something
Speaker 2: for you, going back again to getting outside after that, repeat, repeat, repeat,
Speaker 2: For me, that is the very boring piece of advice
Speaker 2: that we don't want to hear, but it is the
Speaker 2: one that works. You know, it's going to it as
Speaker 2: a human being.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you also have spoken about how back
Speaker 1: to the point about how busyness is almost a status,
Speaker 1: simple high status in our society. That rest is crucial,
Speaker 1: but rest is not the same as doing nothing. You say, yeah,
Speaker 1: this was very pertinent during COVID and people were advised
Speaker 1: to get over it. All those things. You've got a
Speaker 1: rest and people all be like, what's rest? Like I'm
Speaker 1: lying in bed, I'm watching TV on my phone in bed,
Speaker 1: you know, Like it's that kind of thing. And what
Speaker 1: have we learned about that kind of restoration? Do you think?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Because I see rest as a change in action.
Speaker 2: I'm very bad at the kind of rest that is
Speaker 2: simply sitting still, like I just I've never been able
Speaker 2: to do it, and I still can't. But what I
Speaker 2: find RESTful instead, just to give an example, is to
Speaker 2: go into my kitchen and cook something that's like a
Speaker 2: very long process, you know, Like I talk a lot
Speaker 2: of that. I love I love pickling things. It's just
Speaker 2: this sort of weird fetish that my entire family seems
Speaker 2: to have. But what I love about that is it's
Speaker 2: not hard, it's not challenging, but it is slow. So
Speaker 2: you know, you have to chop everything up and you
Speaker 2: have to wait for the pot to boil, and you
Speaker 2: have to give it some patience. And while my hands
Speaker 2: are moving, my intention can kind of roam around a bit,
Speaker 2: and I can think, I certainly can't have my phone
Speaker 2: in my hand at that point. I mean, that's just
Speaker 2: one example, but I do think we need to reconceptualize
Speaker 2: rest and to take it away from this idea, this
Speaker 2: link with me between rest and laziness. You know, rest
Speaker 2: is this essential part of restoring us back to equilibrium,
Speaker 2: and if we skip that step then we probably are
Speaker 2: doing ourselves harm. But equally, if we only see rest
Speaker 2: as sitting watching the TV, I just don't think that's
Speaker 2: very appealing to loads of us. I don't think we
Speaker 2: can rest like that, and it might not even be
Speaker 2: RESTful because it's not really restoring anything in us.
Speaker 1: This explains why I have become a midlife gardener and
Speaker 1: I have a veggiebed, and I get teased a lot
Speaker 1: by all my call journalist pals in the city for
Speaker 1: my gardening. They're like, no, really, Holly, tell us more
Speaker 1: about your zucchinis and your tomatoes. But I've found, possibly
Speaker 1: like you, is that I'm not very good at sitting
Speaker 1: down and doing nothing either, But I feel just remarkably
Speaker 1: reinvigorated after I've spent some time with my hands and
Speaker 1: the soil. It is absolutely owe to me to see
Speaker 1: a seed turn into a seedling, turn into a front
Speaker 1: turn into a plant, like that's it's become. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe that's sort of my kind of meditation in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it's it's this process that
Speaker 2: pulls you back. I mean, presumably nearly every day you
Speaker 2: have to. If you're growing veges, you really do have
Speaker 2: to keep checking back in on them, don't you. And
Speaker 2: I'm a really rubbish gardener. Actually, I feel like I
Speaker 2: should be better at it, but I think I probably
Speaker 2: travel too much and I neglect everything. But I have
Speaker 2: got that from owning a dog. You know, having been
Speaker 2: a committed cat person all my life, we got a
Speaker 2: dog because we saw this poor put that needed rescuing
Speaker 2: and we couldn't resist. And you know, you have to
Speaker 2: walk her every day, Like that's some basic contract you
Speaker 2: make with your dog. And that's that's actually brilliant because
Speaker 2: it made me realize the number of times I actually,
Speaker 2: despite knowing I love walking, would not have walked. I'd
Speaker 2: have let something else take over. I'd I said, oh no,
Speaker 2: I've got to do this this morning. I won't do
Speaker 2: that for myself, but I will always do it for
Speaker 2: the dog. I have to do it for the dog
Speaker 2: that she gets really fed up with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, same in our house. It's it's it's sort of
Speaker 1: sacred time talking. I wanted to ask because your reference
Speaker 1: there that you're traveling a lot, and I think that
Speaker 1: one of the things that people think about burnout and
Speaker 1: reset and looking after yourself is that, well, life goes
Speaker 1: on and demands things of us, and certainly for you.
Speaker 1: You know, you are a best selling author. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that you are invited to do a lot of festivals
Speaker 1: and tours, and you know, it's not like you can
Speaker 1: just turn off and retreat and winter. You know, what
Speaker 1: have you learned about how to sort of ride that
Speaker 1: wave of opportunity of doing something you love, which I
Speaker 1: assume that you do, you know, work around your books
Speaker 1: and your podcast and your newsletter and not letting burn
Speaker 1: out overwhelm you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have to actually be quite firm with myself
Speaker 2: and say no to stuff, which is honestly, as an author,
Speaker 2: it's really hard. I mean, I have been writing since
Speaker 2: my mid twenties. I'm now forty six, she says, counting
Speaker 2: a frantically. And you know, like I've spent many years
Speaker 2: with very few opportunities to get my work out there,
Speaker 2: and now I have an abundance of it, and I
Speaker 2: really do have to be very selective about what I do.
Speaker 2: And that means for me because my busiest time is
Speaker 2: over the winter in the UK, so not your winter,
Speaker 2: like you kind of catch me at the other end
Speaker 2: of the seasons.
Speaker 1: But we're just heading into winter.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right. Yeah, and we're just the days are
Speaker 2: just warming up for us finally after a very long time.
Speaker 2: But you know, like I now have a lot of
Speaker 2: demand on my time over winter. Everybody wants to talk
Speaker 2: to me every suddenly. Members I exist a round about
Speaker 2: late September, and I just see this huge arctic in
Speaker 2: my own box. And still and every year I say
Speaker 2: to my system, it's fine, it's a few years after
Speaker 2: the book's release now, and they won't happen this year.
Speaker 2: It does, so you know, I do all I can
Speaker 2: during that time. But what I won't do is books
Speaker 2: several days of events back to back. I keep too
Speaker 2: clear days a week in my calendar all year round
Speaker 2: because I need that I can't continually output, and over
Speaker 2: the summer I don't book anything. So July and August,
Speaker 2: you will not get yourself into my calendar unless you
Speaker 2: make me a really tempting offer because I need that break.
Speaker 2: I need that fire break actually, and I think yes,
Speaker 2: for creative people, that's a really important thing to think about,
Speaker 2: is how is the sort of balancing outputting and inputting.
Speaker 2: The temptation is to sort of always output because that
Speaker 2: seems productive, that seems like visibly productive from the outside.
Speaker 2: But in order to make my work, I need quiet time,
Speaker 2: I need reading, I need thinking, and I need to
Speaker 2: not be hearing stuff from the outside. I need to
Speaker 2: go inwards. I've learned to really assert that time doesn't
Speaker 2: make me popular with everyone all the time.
Speaker 1: So if we all understand in theory how important it
Speaker 1: is to rest and recharge, why does it still come
Speaker 1: with a big serve of guilt. How do you stop
Speaker 1: yourself feeling guilty about doing well, nothing or close to nothing.
Speaker 1: That's what we're going to talk about next. I think
Speaker 1: that a lot of women, particularly in middle life, feel
Speaker 1: guilty about not maximizing every moment and squeezing every bit
Speaker 1: of productivity out of the day. So we've talked about rest,
Speaker 1: but how do you deal with the guilt that might
Speaker 1: come alongside that. What have you learned about turning that off?
Speaker 1: Have you had to grapple with that yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I grapple with all the time. And you know,
Speaker 2: the guilt is real and it's not easily solved, and
Speaker 2: there's not much messaging that will ever tell you that
Speaker 2: you shouldn't feel guilty if you're needing resources instead of
Speaker 2: generating resources. What I would say that the technique that
Speaker 2: I've been trying to use for years now is to
Speaker 2: acknowledge that needing other people and to keep noticing and
Speaker 2: to keep trying to accept the need to rest in
Speaker 2: other people, and therefore to then not see myself as
Speaker 2: an exception to that rule. It's not easy, though, I mean,
Speaker 2: I think, you know, we do have this desire to
Speaker 2: be productive and to be generating. The care is what
Speaker 2: puts us at the top of the pile, right, It's
Speaker 2: almost a power move. It's no surprise that we feel
Speaker 2: guilty and mid you know, the conversations that we have
Speaker 2: at a societal level. I think this is structural. I
Speaker 2: don't think this is something for the individual to solve, really,
Speaker 2: But I just hope that the more we talk about
Speaker 2: it collectively, the more we can begin to accept it
Speaker 2: in each other and to create an environment. But it's
Speaker 2: much more normal. That's all we can really do.
Speaker 1: I think there was another little light bulb for me
Speaker 1: in enchantment was you were talking about during lockdown. But
Speaker 1: I think this is also very relevant to maybe families
Speaker 1: with small children. You were saying that you and your
Speaker 1: partner or spouse had never argued so much, and you
Speaker 1: realized it was because you're in competition for scarce resources,
Speaker 1: the primary of them being time, and that it revealed
Speaker 1: something primal. And that made me realize something about my
Speaker 1: family and many other families I know who are fighting
Speaker 1: about Well, if you say yes to that, then I
Speaker 1: can't do this. And if it's this time and that time,
Speaker 1: and if you work in that space, then I can't
Speaker 1: work in that That it is something quite primal. We
Speaker 1: are scrapping over a juicy steak, except it's it is
Speaker 1: literal time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And actually I would say that we're actually scrapping
Speaker 2: over what feels like survival to us, because often the
Speaker 2: ability to do our work is connected in our minds
Speaker 2: to you know, being able to eat, being able to
Speaker 2: keep shelter, and yeah, for me, during the lockdown, because
Speaker 2: I've always worked from home as a writer of this ley,
Speaker 2: the first thing that happened was that my husband moved
Speaker 2: next to me onto my desk to do his nine
Speaker 2: to five job, which I found I'm very I mean
Speaker 2: obviously relate. God he I remember turning to him once,
Speaker 2: this is not my proudest moment, saying, do you know
Speaker 2: you grunt when you type?
Speaker 1: My partner bangs when he types. It's this unbearable, And
Speaker 1: I was like, could you type more quietly? And he's
Speaker 1: no one has ever said that to me before. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've never had to share a working space with you before.
Speaker 2: I know, it was awful, and I found that I
Speaker 2: because my work is really different. My work's like a
Speaker 2: lot of staring into space and thinking I couldn't think
Speaker 2: with somebody working next to me and taking phone calls,
Speaker 2: and so that meant that I was the one that
Speaker 2: had to do childcare while he was working. And so
Speaker 2: but the logic of that is that my work then
Speaker 2: happened at these really awful edges of the day, like
Speaker 2: getting up at four point thirty in the morning to
Speaker 2: do some work and then working when he finished at five,
Speaker 2: And I felt like I was living this kind of
Speaker 2: borderline existence and it really it really made me think
Speaker 2: about how there is no equality in these moments. It's
Speaker 2: just you're literally scrambling to do what you can. And
Speaker 2: mine was the work that broke the easiest because I
Speaker 2: didn't have an office that trying to you know, work
Speaker 2: simultaneously with me. It made me realize how fragile creative
Speaker 2: work is and how we don't, Yes, we find it
Speaker 2: really hard to give it the same value as other
Speaker 2: kinds of work.
Speaker 1: It's so true, and shove it into these little gaps
Speaker 1: that we can find, which actually isn't conducive to deep
Speaker 1: creative work obviously. So I wanted to ask you just
Speaker 1: to touch back on Wintering for a minute. You wrote
Speaker 1: a lot in that book about the necessity of ritual
Speaker 1: and marking chunks of time and passages that I found
Speaker 1: really interesting because in secular societies we've lost a lot
Speaker 1: of those kind of possible ceremonial moments that are like
Speaker 1: the beginning of a season and the end of the
Speaker 1: Why do you think that that is important to us
Speaker 1: to mark different periods of time in our lives and
Speaker 1: what are some examples of ways that you or we
Speaker 1: could do that.
Speaker 2: Well, It's a question that I found so interesting that
Speaker 2: I'm now writing a whole book about I have a
Speaker 2: lot of thoughts, but I think i'd start by saying
Speaker 2: that ritual isn't something that was a big part of
Speaker 2: my life until I wrote Wintering. It was something that
Speaker 2: I felt very I felt a pulled towards, but I
Speaker 2: felt very awkward about that pull, and I didn't know
Speaker 2: how to express it. I have learned to recognize my
Speaker 2: need for that, and I think I think that that's
Speaker 2: about us coming to terms with the nature of time
Speaker 2: itself in lots of ways. I think what our rituals
Speaker 2: do is they help us to understand the progress of
Speaker 2: human life. They help us to understand the cycles that
Speaker 2: are moving around us all the time. And what they're
Speaker 2: really about is a constant situating of us, of ourselves
Speaker 2: within these bigger movements over which we have no control,
Speaker 2: and so they're like a moment of agency set against
Speaker 2: asked forces that are that we're tiny in the context of.
Speaker 2: And a lot of us don't do anything based on
Speaker 2: ritual or based on kind of pools or contemplation or reflection,
Speaker 2: because the only route we know to it is from
Speaker 2: kind of things like school assemblies.
Speaker 1: You know, and yes, you know, maybe festival.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, or maybe those people who've walked away
Speaker 2: from organized religion, you know, see that as intrinsic to
Speaker 2: the thing that they walked away from. But I am
Speaker 2: so interested in figuring out how we maintain that ritual life,
Speaker 2: which I think is really fundamental to our humanity, outside
Speaker 2: of feeling like it's about kind of being disciplined or
Speaker 2: being told what to feel and think.
Speaker 1: In the feeling tiny. I've heard you say about awe that,
Speaker 1: and this also resonated with me that when you were
Speaker 1: small and you thought about the scale of the universe,
Speaker 1: but you hated it, like it was it's an awful
Speaker 1: feeling to think of how tiny and insignificant you are,
Speaker 1: and you're like, that makes me feel strange. I don't
Speaker 1: want to think about that, but that as you have
Speaker 1: grown older and wiser perhaps or whatever we want to
Speaker 1: call that, you actually find it comforting. Why why is that?
Speaker 2: Well? I just I remember the first time that somebody
Speaker 2: told me that the universe is probably infinite, that feeling
Speaker 2: so deeply unsettled by that, And I think I'm still
Speaker 2: thinking about what that means now. But actually, as an adult,
Speaker 2: I'm really glad to have that burden lifted off me
Speaker 2: of being the center of the world. I mean, I
Speaker 2: feel far too much like the center of my little
Speaker 2: realm already. I feel like everything is contingent on my
Speaker 2: attention and my action all the time. And to step
Speaker 2: outside of that immediate family situation, that immediate friendship group,
Speaker 2: that immediate work situation, and to realize what a kind
Speaker 2: of minute spec I am in a vast first country,
Speaker 2: you know, vast town alone, a vast universe, and you
Speaker 2: know that for me, that's about the practice of humility,
Speaker 2: which I work on in myself A lot is understanding
Speaker 2: how small I am, understanding how insignificant my needs are
Speaker 2: within this wider context, and therefore learning to kind of
Speaker 2: take action knowing that rather than thinking that I have
Speaker 2: to somehow claw my way to the top of a pile.
Speaker 2: It's a relief, honestly, it's a relief. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's interesting too, because in another interview I was doing,
Speaker 1: a woman said to me that she had to, as
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, say no to a lot
Speaker 1: of things because her mental health was suffering, step out
Speaker 1: of a lot of the responsibilities she had, and she
Speaker 1: thought that she was so central everything would crumble, but
Speaker 1: actually what she found is people stepped in and supported her,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I think that might be something that
Speaker 1: a lot of women who are caring and working and
Speaker 1: working and caring need to hear a bit, you know
Speaker 1: that we can step away.
Speaker 2: Absolutely Amen too. That the insight that I have to
Speaker 2: give people over and over again from Wintering is that
Speaker 2: you know, these things are not choices, Like if we
Speaker 2: don't act on our sense of burnout, our sense of dislocation,
Speaker 2: it will visit us anyway. You know, we can't infinitely
Speaker 2: push these things away, and it's actually a great privilege
Speaker 2: sometimes to let ourselves be cared for. It's you know,
Speaker 2: we need to understand that care is a cycle and
Speaker 2: we can't choose to only output care. We must also
Speaker 2: learn to receive care, and when we do receive care
Speaker 2: from other people, despite what we've been trained to think
Speaker 2: that it's a weakness and that we're, you know, leeching
Speaker 2: on society somehow. Most people who give care for privilege
Speaker 2: to give it, and we must learn to be generous
Speaker 2: in being vulnerable enough to allow people to care for
Speaker 2: us sometimes because if we don't, if we hold all
Speaker 2: the caregiving to ourselves, we're actually being quite selfish and
Speaker 2: quite self centered. Your children are waiting to care for you,
Speaker 2: Your parents are wanting to care for your friends are
Speaker 2: wanting to give care. The big skill is allowing that
Speaker 2: in and it's hard, but it's important to learn, you know.
Speaker 1: I listened back to that conversation with Catherine May and
Speaker 1: it was like everything slowed down. Did you hear that?
Speaker 1: It was like the way I talk, so I ask questions,
Speaker 1: of course, the thoughtful way she answers them. Now you
Speaker 1: know that on me, I want to have a variety
Speaker 1: of conversations, ones that energize, ones that help, ones that nourish,
Speaker 1: and this was one of those for me, and I
Speaker 1: hope for you too. I hope you're already sending a
Speaker 1: message to a frazzled friend about letting herself be cared
Speaker 1: for sometimes, or about how it's not her fault that
Speaker 1: she can't meditate twice a day every day in the
Speaker 1: chaos of her life. And I hope you're thinking about
Speaker 1: what rest means to you. And then it looks like
Speaker 1: a lot of different things, but it's not selfish or
Speaker 1: lazy to want it. I hope you feel like I
Speaker 1: do that. I just sipped a warm bowl of something.
Speaker 1: Next week on MID we're bringing you something different again,
Speaker 1: almost the opposite. In fact, Helen Thorn is a comedian
Speaker 1: who's been through a lot in her first few years
Speaker 1: of being mid betrayal, divorce, loss, but we're talking about
Speaker 1: possibly one of the hardest things to talk about in public.
Speaker 1: We're talking about bodies, deep breaths. Come and join us
Speaker 1: on MID next week. Massive thanks to my excellent producer,
Speaker 1: to Elizabeth As and wherever you're listening to Mid, go
Speaker 1: give us a like a review of Share. It means
Speaker 1: a lot. We'll see you back in next week.